, hindrances, and difficulties, which
make it hard to live successfully. Every one has to move onward and
upward through ranks of resistances. This is true of physical life.
Every baby that is born begins at once a struggle for existence. To be
victorious and live, or to succumb and die? is the question of every
cradle, and only half the babies born reach their teens. After that,
until its close, life is a continuous struggle with the manifold forms
of physical infirmity. If we live to be old it must be through our
victoriousness over the unceasing antagonism of accident and disease.

The same is true in mental progress. It must be made against
resistance. It is never easy to become a scholar or to attain
intellectual culture. It takes years and years of study and discipline
to draw out and train the faculties of the mind. An indolent,
self-indulgent student may have an easy time; he never troubles himself
with difficult problems; he lets the hard things pass, not vexing his
brain with them. But in evading the burden he misses the blessing that
was in it for him. The only path to the joys and rewards of
scholarship is that of patient, persistent toil.

It is true also in spiritual life. We enter a world of antagonism and
opposition the moment we resolve at Christ's feet to be Christians, to
be true men or women, to forsake sin, to obey God, to do our duty.
There never comes a day when we can live nobly and worthily without
effort, without resistance to wrong influences, without struggle
against the power of temptation. It never gets easy to be good.
Evermore the cross lies at our feet, and daily it must be taken up and
carried, if we would follow Christ. We are apt to grow weary of this
unending struggle, and to become discouraged, because there is neither
rest nor abatement in it.

But here again we learn that it is out of just such struggles that we
must get the nobleness and beauty of character after which we are
striving. One of the old Scotch martyrs had on his crest the motto,
_Sub pondere cresco_ ("I grow under a weight"). On the crest was a
palm-tree, with weights depending from its fronds. In spite of the
weights the tree was straight as an arrow, lifting its crown of
graceful foliage high up in the serene air. It is well known that the
palm grows best loaded down with weights. Thus this martyr testified
that he, like the beautiful tree of the Orient, grew best in his
spiritual life under